Posts tagged ‘语言 language’

Tyler Coburn (USA) will be performing I’m that angel in HomeShop at 7 pm on Saturday, August 3rd. The language of performance will be English.

“I’m that angel is a cycle of writings and performances that explore the conditions of how we work on and against the computer, narrated from the perspective of a “content farmer”: an emergent type of online journalist contracted to generate articles based on words peaking in Google Trends.” —Tyler Coburn

Tyler Coburn (b. 1983, New York City) is an artist and writer based in New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from Yale University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Coburn’s projects have been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; CAC Vilnius; LAXART, Los Angeles; and SculptureCenter, New York.

This comes in the after effects of our reading group discussing Claire Bishop today, a contestable figure in the realm of participatory art practices today, we fall in and out of line. We discussed quite a bit about the different politics of maker/audience relations, the possibilities and limitations of criticism (or the lack thereof) amidst the alternating roles of curator, artist and audience. Whether it’s about critique or pure naiveté, what necessarily emerges in this triangulation is the question of community. Who is speaking to whom, and does that relationship generate community, make it elitist, or raise propositions to completely unpredictable others? We move from the Argentinians who use socially engaged art to motivate participants to push forward in the realm of the socio-political, to the Eastern Europeans and Russians who evade the directly political for a meta-political alter-realm of the sensible, to ourselves. Dialogue evinces a form of self-reflexivity that cannot conceptualize self without other, a 对方. Is that 对 antagonistic, or, like the best love letter i ever received, simply… “Yes.”? 对 Duì, in that Chinese sensibility, pragmatic, like its ‘寸 hand’ on the right and in the traditional 對, where on the left 业 industry stands over 王 rulership. Our being in place is oppositional, but insofar that we do in order to be relative to others (power). And if those power struggles are not finite, we have a form of agonism that does not value one way over an other, but in its perpetual instability, the way itself. This ‘way‘ is meta-politics, it is aesthetics, and perhaps, it is from here the beginning of a research into style. Style here cannot be separately conceived from its actors or audiences, and perhaps, it may be one of the last remaining realms where the spectator possesses the most valuable rights of critique towards an author who does not see him/herself (is that democratic?). So who is the curator here? The media, the mob, or the system itself? That which cannot be critiqued in and of itself is power, is the stampede sparked by inadvertent incident, where action supersedes any one intention or attempt to communicate. Style is only manifestation, it is the superficialness of the masses, it is a form of representation that both critiques (bitchy) and evades critique (inessential). So to go from there, it seems possible to start from two cultural forms of analysis: one, fashion and semiotics, starting from Barthes and moving forward, and then, translation as a mediator of meaning. Maybe thereafter, something more spiritually or politically charged, but that will come upon further introspection of what that “we” really meant… Until then…

There are supposedly two areas in which you can know you’ve mastered a foreign language: 1) being able to speak in the language of love and 2), being able to verbally put up a fight. The first is private and intimate, a heart to heart where language is necessary but perhaps not the most important, nor possible to practice in a group setting. The latter is a public, sharply dialectical, either you or me head-to-head where language is very important. So why not come together at HomeShop for our COMBAT LANGUAGE playground? Learn more about culture, hot topics in China and your real fighting spirit through COMBAT LANGUAGE. Improve your vocabulary and put your logic on its toes!

With people getting caught up in the politics of climate change, believers versus skeptics, the reality is that the source of energy that fuels industry affects both the environment and the economy. China is heavily dependent on coal burning more than half of the world’s annual consumption. China has also become to world leader in wind power capacity and solar panel manufacturing. Any way you cut it, producing energy is a highly profitable business. Burning fossil fuels is in conflict with renewable energy, so which one has the long term future in China? Get yourself ready for combat language debate!

价格 cost__ 30元（包括饮料 includes beverages）

参与者 participants__ 中高级英语学生以及任何对本话题感兴趣的朋友Intermediate to Advanced students of English, or any English speakers interested in the topic

报名请联系 registration required__ qu@homeshopbeijing.org, 138 1180 9604报名后你将通过邮件收到一份相关阅读材料。After signing up for this workshop you will receive all the necessary materials/vocabulary list by e-mail to prepare for the debate.

There are supposedly two areas in which you can know you’ve mastered a foreign language: 1) being able to speak in the language of love and 2), being able to verbally put up a fight. The first is private and intimate, a heart to heart where language is necessary but perhaps not the most important, nor possible to practice in a group setting. The latter is a public, sharply dialectical, either you or me head-to-head where language is very important. So why not come together at HomeShop for our COMBAT LANGUAGE playground? Learn more about culture, hot topics in China and your real fighting spirit through COMBAT LANGUAGE. Improve your vocabulary and put your Chinese logic on its toes!

第一场 Debate One

论题 topic__ “子非鱼，安知鱼之乐？You’re not a fish, so how can you know if a fish is happy or not?”

More than two thousand years ago, Zhuangzi and Huizi started a debate at the bridge over the Hao river: “You’re not a fish, so how can you know if a fish is happy or not?” It sounded like a joke, but their dialogue was full of the intricacies of a deep culture, logic, and the relations between people. So if you are an intermediate to advanced learner of Chinese, why not try and join these two philosophers’ debate? Will you follow Zhuangzi or Huizi, or will you surpass them both? Get yourself ready for COMBAT LANGUAGE debate!

价格 cost__ 30元（包括饮料 includes beverages）

参与者 participants__ 中高级汉语学生以及任何对本话题感兴趣的朋友Intermediate to Advanced students of Chinese, or any Chinese speakers interested in the topic

报名请联系 registration required__ qu@homeshopbeijing.org, 138 1180 9604报名后你将通过邮件收到一份相关阅读材料。After signing up for this workshop you will receive all the necessary materials/vocabulary list by e-mail to prepare for the debate.

Last meeting we discussed desire from two distinct but quite broad perspectives:

From Deleuze and Guattari, we saw desire as part of a machine that includes but subsumes the individual and their ego, and makes of subject and object a co-determining relationship rather than a hierarchical structure;

In Bataille, we saw a dangerous desire that threatens to dissolve the subject and the object into one another, and if pursued to its ecstatic ends, approaches death;

Keeping in mind why we arrived at desire in the first place, we wondered what these perspectives could do to help our dilemma of abstraction and speed;

In the former, where in the machine does intention fit? Where do we locate the means to make a distinction between desire and abstraction such as that made in Bifo’s article?

In the latter does the subject and object divide that the subject must overcome presuppose its inability to make the connection between them? In other words at the extremity of becoming an object (to the point of suicide) do we gain the capacity to “reactivate our ability to connect language and desire”(Bifo), or do we simply assume they can ultimately never be resolved? (Bataille seems to offer a partial answer to this: literature as the substitution of death and sacrifice.)

The next reading proposed is “Bodies That Matter” by Judith Butler (1993) to approach desire through a more focused lens on the construction of sexuality. The meeting will be held Sunday the 8th of January at 5pm.

Hope you can join in one more repudiation of the solar hegemony before our flight from the terror of the lunar!

It seems that we are full of offers lately. Hmm… presumptions aside, it’s not really an offer, because everyone wants reciprocation. To communicate and to understand. To love and be loved. Are skills naturally to be shared? If you know, will I know better?

So what is on offer today? Let’s attempt skill-sharing set number 1. HomeShop’s very own Twist QU is now offering language instruction for those of you interested in Chinese culture and history and hoping to improve your Chinese or English skills. This is the offer. What is the return?

We learn about Twist via the return, the things he could be interested in (French, documentary film, etc.), and through these (hopefully) common dialogues, we create the bonds that make an offer into an exchange, into something sustainable, into something like an understanding between people. Twist is most interested in communication.

About his offer, Twist is a graduate from Liaoning University with over 15 years of experience in language instruction, both in Chinese and English. His students have ranged from post ’90s Tongxian teenyboppers to expat architects and even a few liu mang-kind of artists, and his interests include philosophy and literature. For more information, you can download Twist’s CV here [PDF, 45kb].

His language lessons are taught one-on-one or in small groups, and meetings can be held at your convenience in the neighbourhood of Gulou/Nanluoguxiang. If money is the easiest way to go, lessons begin from RMB 60 per hour, but Twist’s exchange could also involve French lessons, or video assistance for his new documentary project involving a series of dialogues with members of Beijing’s artist community. If you are interested to pursue one or more of these kinds of “sharing” or “exchange” (where do the two intersect?), Twist is happy to meet with you for a free trial lesson. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact him directly: